Sleephelp

He always had quite a lot of trouble getting to sleep, not to the point of insomnia, but falling asleep was usually pretty difficult for him. Eventually, he found several YouTube channels that posted various videos with titles like, "guided meditation for a good night's sleep", or, "bi-neural tones to help you sleep", and things like that. The videos were a few hours of mellow noises, white noise, like reverberating tones, light whirring noises, and things of the like, often accompanied by a quiet voice instructing how to relax your body and mind so you can easily drift into sleep. The audio was accompanied by still pictures of lakes, or swirling animations or something like that, but the visuals weren't really relevant. He listened to them on an old iPod touch plugged into a speaker dock on the nightstand. Each night, he would climb into bed, start the video, adjust the volume, turn out the light, and would be dozing in a matter of minutes.

After a few months of listening to these videos before bed, they were almost necessary for him to be able to sleep a wink.

While surfing around, he noticed an unfamiliar channel simply called, "SleepHelp", it had about five videos uploaded, all of which were of course sleep meditation videos, without narration. They usually had a very small number of views, with eight being its record. He loaded one up that was titled, "SleepHelp easy sleep relaxation". As it played, He found that it was very similar to most other sleep meditation videos, but for some reason he fell asleep almost momentarily. Because of the great results, he continued listening to content from this channel.

By the time he had listened to the first five, two more were uploaded. Then after that, there weren't any new uploads for a week or two. After the brief hiatus, a new video was uploaded titled "Sleep 001.mp4". He figured the person running the channel forgot to give it an actual name. When he listened to it, the audio was a bit quieter than usual, but still same sort of video. With that, he went to sleep.

He woke up the next morning with a nosebleed. This was not at all unusual for him, but what struck him as odd was that he could not exit the video. He tried the back button and the home button and the video would not close. This didn't surprise him that much because the iPod was quite old and prone to bouts of lag. After restarting the iPod, it was working fine again.

That night when he went to bed, he put on the new video of that day. "Sleep 002.mp4". That night, he had some pretty disturbing dreams, suffice it to say, I won't go into detail. He woke up with a splitting headache and another bloody nose. This time the video had exited on its own, oddly. Later that day he tried playing some music, but all he got was static. The iPod dock was shot. He was a bit upset by this because it was a pretty expensive one.

That next night he decided to go without the videos for obvious reasons, and went to sleep after about thirty minutes. As usual, there were nightmares even more horrific than the previous, and he woke up with a headache and bloody nose. This time, the video was playing when he woke up. At that point, he got pretty freaked out and turned off the iPod.

After that night, he started hearing the sounds when it was quiet, and felt tired all the time. When he went to bed, he still heard the videos, even though they weren't on. It's been like this every night and he wakes up the same every morning, but worse. He struggles not to fall asleep at work or in the car, and when he does doze off he has the nightmares, regardless of the time of day.

He was going to leave a comment on the channel, warning people not to watch it, but when he looked, he couldn't find it.

He sleeps more and more, he would stay awake if he could, mainly because of the nightmares, but he can't. He hears the sound all the time now. He doesn't drive anymore and he falls over often when walking and passes out on the ground. He's starting to fully break down. His doctor's appointment is tomorrow, but he can't muster the energy to leave my house. His futile attempts to remain awake take all his strength. His nose bleeds constantly and he has splitting headaches 24/7. He tries to stop the bleeding, but nothing helps. His blood pressure is through the roof. He's dying, and he's petrified of what horrors await in an endless sleep.

I turn off the monitor. They'll clean up his body and pick up the cameras tomorrow.